19 June 2009

Flat Hoe.

Could this possibly be the best hoe in the world? Well, probably not but to me it’s without a doubt my favourite hoe. I know this kind of hoe as a ‘flat hoe’ and the only bad thing about this hoe as far as you guys are concerned is that Wolf Garten Tools don’t seem to make it anymore – go figure that one out if you can. For that reason I only show you this because no doubt someone else makes one and it’s the actual design rather than the brand that makes this hoe my favourite. For me this particular hoe has a neutral feel in that it neither tries to leave the soil nor digs to deep, this makes it very controllable. It will deal equally well with both small weeds and big tall over grown stuff. With it just having the single leg joining the blade there is a minimum of dirt pick up and if you turn it over you can use it this way to work over the soil like a mini spade. I also use it a lot this way to work the soil back away from the grass edging. You can of course do the same with the Dutch hoe that I showed you last night but for some reason the flat hoe does it better. This is actually the second of these hoes I’ve bought. After using the first one for a while and liked it so much I bought this one and then set about halving the blade on the original hoe so making an half size version. I’ve had this hoe for the best part of 20 years now so durability is not an issue and this applies to all Wolf tools. The only thing that has ever broken are a couple of wooden shafts and this was probably due more to misuse than bad quality. So for this type of hoe I will give 10 out of 10, for usability of this particular hoe I will give 9 out of 10, it isn’t quite perfect in that I would like the union with the blade to be more streamlined. As far as I’m concerned the only other way to improve on this design would to make it out of copper.

There is some dirt pick up with this hoe due in part to the bulky union with the blade.This hoe was the same but has had one side of the blade removed to make a smaller version.Here you can see the hoe flipped over to tidy along the edge of the border - now you know how Bob gets those neat edges!

2 comments:

The halved version looks quite similar to one my father showed me as his favourite a couple of weeks ago. He said his father had bought is for his mother as a present (she was a very keen gardener, although I suspect he used it at least as much as she did, she did keep him busy!). Oddly enough it doesn't look like an old tool, and neither does her spade.